Contraband and counterfeiting cause significant loss of revenue to producers of traded goods as well as for national authorities. Moreover, the illegal sale of counterfeited goods of inferior quality is detrimental to the customer and to the manufacturer.
Legally produced goods may also be illegally imported or traded, for example in order to evade taxes or national regulations. It is therefore a major concern in several trade areas to detect and avoid unauthorized parallel import channels.
The problems of contraband and counterfeiting are particularly acute for goods subject to special taxation, like tobacco products. They also exist for many other kinds of traded products carrying a strong brand value, in particular for internationally traded products, such as perfumes, alcohols, watches and luxury goods in general.
It is a major concern of the manufacturers of such products to develop methods for reliably marking genuine products such as to enable the unequivocal identification of non-genuine products and the detection of illegal imports.
It is common practice to identify traded goods by a production code, or serial number, impressed or printed on the package, for example a cigarette pack or carton. Such a code, under certain conditions, enables identification of the production site, and the tracking of the trade chain for a particular item. Such knowledge is useful in identifying smuggled items.
A limitation of this practice is that the interpretation and validation of these production codes can be time-consuming and cumbersome. For example, authentication may require every production code impressed on a manufactured item to be recorded in a database and/or the transfer of a large amount of confidential data from the manufacturing site to a central database. These requirements may jeopardize reliability and safety.
Another limitation of this practice is that the production codes can easily be imitated or cloned. To partially obviate this limitation, it is known to add a covert taggant to the ink used to print the production code on the package. Counterfeit items carrying clones of valid codes can be thus detected by the absence of the covert taggant. The security provided by this method depends entirely on the ability to control the sources and the availability of the taggant.
The present invention aims to address the deficiencies in the prior art approaches described above.
According to the invention, there is provided a method of marking manufactured items, comprising: providing a plurality of secret codes to a checking centre and to a production line for the manufactured items; generating an ID code for each manufactured item; digitally signing each ID code by means of a secret derived from the plurality of secret codes and known to the checking centre; and marking each manufactured item with said signed ID code.
The present invention also provides a method of authenticating an item marked according to the method above comprising transmitting the said signed ID code to said checking centre; and authenticating the ID code at the checking centre.
The invention also provides a system for marking manufactured items comprising: a generator, for generating collections of secret codes; a production line for manufacturing the items to be marked, the production line comprising: a code generator for generating an ID code for each manufactured item; a digital signor for signing the ID codes with a secret derived from the secret codes; a data transmitter for transmitting the secret to a checking centre; and a marker for marking each manufactured item with the signed ID code.
The invention also provides a method of authenticating a manufactured item, comprising: generating a code and signing said code with a digital signature within a code generator; marking the item with the signed code; transmitting the signed code to a checking centre over a public network; authenticating the digital signature by the checking centre; retrieving the significance of the code at the checking centre; and transmitting the significance to a user over the public network.
A further aspect of the invention resides in a method of controlling the volume of manufactured items marked by the marking method above, comprising: gathering manufacturing volume information at the checking centre; and providing the manufacturing volume information to a user.
The invention also provides a method of tracking an item marked by to the marking method above, comprising: transmitting the signed ID code to the checking centre; authenticating the ID code by the checking centre; and retransmitting the tracking information related to the ID code to a user.
Embodiments of the various aspects of the invention have the advantage that marking and authentication can be accessed and interrogated remotely by an ordinary network, such as a land or mobile telephone. The marking and authentication has the further advantage that it may not be violated by counterfeiters. Moreover, the genuineness of a manufactured item on sale can be checked easily, for example within a few seconds at the point of sale.
Embodiments of aspects of the invention have the further advantage that cloned codes and unauthorized code duplications may be identified, and that the production volume, for example of a given manufacturer, manufacturing site or manufacturing line, may be controlled.
Embodiments of aspects of the invention have the further advantage that they may be used to replace the system of fiscal stickers that is used in many countries to collect taxes, for example on tobacco products.